So, I originally thought the trainer was crashing my game...no such luck. Turns out there is a KNOWN issue that if you have a GTX 690 and a Win 7/8 64-bit system, the game will just crash...awesome. This is from the 310.70 release notes, under the known issues section:

So, I decided to give it another go, but this time completely turned MSAA off, leaving all other settings untouched. So far, I've been able to complete the 1st and 2nd levels with no crashed and am still playing... So it appears that that is where the issue lies.